Forum:Lack of formatted citations and large numbers of web sources
While we've got much better about citing information, I've noticed that we have most of our citations completely out of format and others with some sort of miscellaneous format. It's important that we have them in proper format for reputability. Also, we might want to have some sort of review for websites before they can be cited. I think that a lot of them are just tertiary sources (we are too) where people are just writing down a compilation of what they've learned. That's fine for information purposes, but it's not that great in terms of reputability or verifiability. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 22:25, May 13, 2013 (UTC) :True, I do notice that there are a lot of out of format articles but I think that those aren't a particularly urgent problem. Slowly one by one they are being corrected. Still, it may be a good idea to mark them with clean up even if they aren't that bad just for the sake of record keeping. As for the sources, I think that one to two web sources is ok but more are preferable because one can cross reference information. Furthermore, users should be encouraged to add some additional information and cite new sources for information. In general, I think we are doing fairly well and more of the wiki's efforts should be put towards completing stubs instead of fixing articles that already contain the key information. By the way, I'm going to create an official list of "good" websites that users can use for citing sources but do you think I should also put some accurate books as well? -- 23:27,5/13/2013 23:27, May 13, 2013 (UTC) ::I think that expanding the wiki is very important, but having good citations is also important for getting knowledgeable people to edit with us and help expand the wiki. If it doesn't look like we take it seriously, people won't want to spend their time editing here. I think that some sort of progression like you suggest is fine, and we should have some sort of citation reformation tagging, because otherwise it won't get done. I like your list of web sources idea. As for books, it might be easier to have a blacklist of books that aren't allowed, since there's going to be too many acceptable books to catalog. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 00:04, May 14, 2013 (UTC) :::What kind of books would be blacklisted? Unrelated books like novels about other subjects or just plain false books? -- 00:07,5/14/2013 00:07, May 14, 2013 (UTC) ::::Probably books written by Holocaust deniers and the like. Anything fictional would automatically be unreliable. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 01:37, May 14, 2013 (UTC) I'll get to work compiling the list of reliable sources. I also found that you marked several articles with improper sources even though they had web sources. Is it because they are not necessarily in Chicago format or is it because they need book support. If not in Chicago format, there is not really much we can do at this point. We can try to convert them but it would be too large of a job to handle and we have many other issues to deal with at the moment. Anyway, they are at least ok in my opinion the way they are cited. -- 03:03,5/14/2013 03:03, May 14, 2013 (UTC) :It's because they weren't properly formatted. I don't think we need to drop everything over this, but we need to make sure that it gets done at some point. I will admit that it's not as bad when we have some sort of format than when we have just links. Our overall quality has improved a lot, but we still have a way to go. Having a formal tone will help bring in who are veterans of the subject. I've also learned a lot about historiography since I started here, which has helped. I realize it might seem a bit anal to focus on Chicago citations, but it's what historians expect. The thing that we should really avoid is citations that are just simple links, without any other information. That sort of thing makes the article seem very thrown together. Plus, a lot of web sources are tertiary sources, which this wiki is as an encyclopedia. [[User:Inquisitor Ehrenstein|'Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein' aus dem Sturmkrieg Sector]] ( ) 04:05, May 14, 2013 (UTC)